A FIFA World Cup 2026™ match reached millions of fans in real time. Unfortunately, streaming piracy can reach them too.
Unauthorized streams can appear within minutes, spread across platforms, and build audiences while a match is still underway. For broadcasters and rights holders, protecting premium content is no longer just about finding illegal streams. It’s about combating video piracy, prioritizing threats, and taking them down before they scale.
That was the challenge Globant and TelevisaUnivision tackled together during the FIFA World Cup 2026™. By combining automation, real-time intelligence, and anti-piracy technology, the teams built a faster, more scalable approach to protecting premium broadcast rights during one of the biggest live events in the world.
When every minute counts
Live content protection and piracy monitoring generate a massive volume of signals. The hard part is knowing which ones matter most and acting before an unauthorized stream gains momentum.
Globant integrated automated workflows into TelevisaUnivision’s monitoring operation to help teams process detections faster, prioritize the highest-impact threats, and accelerate takedowns. The result was more than automation. It gave the team a way to focus human expertise where it could make the biggest difference.
Not every threat is equal
A stream watched by a few people is one problem. A stream reaching thousands of viewers during a highly anticipated match is another.
That’s why the operation used real-time audience and distribution signals to help prioritize threats based on their potential reach and commercial impact.
Some unauthorized streams were reaching more than 2,000 concurrent viewers. Instead of treating every detection the same, the team could focus first on the threats that mattered most.
Built for the peaks
The World Cup doesn’t operate at an average pace, nor does content protection. During peak match windows, the operation handled up to 60 concurrent detections in a single match, while maintaining responsiveness across the monitoring workflow.
During the knockout stages, the operation achieved a 77% live mitigation rate. Successful takedowns reached a 13-minute median response time, with 82% resolved within 30 minutes.
That matters because sports piracy compounds quickly. The longer an unauthorized stream stays live, the more opportunities it has to attract viewers, spread, and erode the value of premium rights.
The bigger shift: from monitoring to intelligent enforcement
The work with TelevisaUnivision points to a broader change in how premium content can be protected. Automation doesn’t replace specialized teams. It gives them a better operating model, one that can process more signals, surface the threats that matter, and support faster decisions when the stakes are high.
That becomes increasingly important as the digital media ecosystem becomes more fragmented and live audiences continue to grow.
The same principle extends beyond sports. Whether it’s a World Cup match, a live entertainment event, or another high-value broadcast, content protection has to operate at the speed of the audience and the threats trying to reach it.
“Protecting the integrity of the World Cup was a top priority for us, and our close collaboration with Globant was critical to that success,” said Juan Carlos Barreto, senior manager of technical product at TelevisaUnivision. “Combining our operational expertise with their advanced technology enabled us to defend our broadcast rights while delivering a seamless, secure viewing experience for millions of fans.”
For Globant and TelevisaUnivision, the World Cup was a real-world test at enormous scale.
The result was a more responsive, impact-driven approach to content security: combining technology and human expertise to help safeguard premium media rights and the viewing experience for audiences around the world.
For more information about Globant’s Media & Entertainment studio and asset protection solutions, visit globant.com/media-entertainment.
